Some presidential children show rebellious streaks

Posted: Sunday, June 03, 2001

By Calvin WoodwardAssociated Press

WASHINGTON -- Some children of presidents have been a handful, all right. Even the headstrong Teddy Roosevelt, dealing with his difficult daughter Alice, said he could run either the country or her, but not both.

Roosevelt ran the country. The endearing, exasperating Alice ran off at the mouth for the rest of her very long life.

Guarding the privacy of the children and keeping a lid on their missteps have been a high order from one White House to the next. President Bush, himself the misbehaving son of a man who became president, has tried as hard as anyone to keep his children out of the spotlight.

His hopes on that score were dashed when his 19-year-old twin daughters were cited last week under Texas' underage-drinking laws -- Jenna for the second time.

Bush and his wife, Laura, rarely brought forward their daughters during his campaign. Except in the most irresistible family moments, like Inauguration Day, he kept them well in the shadows, where they wanted to be.

Even Chelsea Clinton, whose privacy was closely guarded and largely respected, was employed as a political asset, if a silent one.

Chelsea -- age 12 when Bill Clinton became president and 20 when he left -- appeared in her mother's Senate campaign as well as at Democratic conventions and on some world trips.

She stood between mother and father, holding their hands, in a particularly difficult moment after the Monica Lewinsky revelations, neatly illustrating both the distance and the enduring linkage between the president and first lady.

In a time when the personal is political and character can be peddled with the same importance as policies, it becomes impossible to keep families off limits, said Paul Costello, who was a press secretary to first lady Rosalynn Carter.

''The door that these candidates have opened is hard to shut,'' Costello said. ''This banner of family values, it does open the question: When the coin flips and there is trouble, how can you hold people back from asking questions?''

Bush opened it indirectly, with his emphasis on character and trust and his occasional musings on the challenges of raising two teen-age daughters.

As someone who watched Amy Carter grow into adolescence in the White House, Costello says times have changed for the children of presidents.

''I don't remember the press being admonished from the podium to respect the private lives of the Carter family,'' he said, ''because it wasn't really necessary.''

Before the Carter children, there were the Ford children. Susan Ford Bales, a teen-ager when her father, Gerald Ford, was president, now says she probably did some underage drinking then, too.

But she was subjected to genteel scrutiny at the time -- people clucked when she wore jeans in the White House and the social set was riveted when she had her prom there.

Brother Jack Ford tended toward the unkempt, like many young men in the 1970s. He hung out with celebrities and admitted later to smoking marijuana.

Attention given to the children of presidents has been a mixed blessing over the years. Generally, the younger they are, the more of a blessing -- John-John's scampering about the Oval Office did much to enhance the appeal of the presidency of his father, John F. Kennedy.

The grown-up Neil Bush, on the other hand, did not make his father look good, earning sanctions for conflict of interest in a savings and loan debacle while George H.W. Bush was president.

Patti Davis took off her clothes for Playboy after her father, Ronald Reagan, left office, and she acknowledged having used cocaine. Ron Reagan Jr. danced in his underwear on ''Saturday Night Live'' in 1986, and was a vocal opponent of his father's conservative politics.

Margaret Truman, then 26, was famously panned for her singing at Constitution Hall in 1950. Her father, Harry Truman, wrote a letter to the critic promising to break his nose and blacken his eyes if the two should meet. (They later met, amicably.)

Then there was Alice Roosevelt, in a class of her own.

Her 1980 obituary in The Washington Post tells of a girl who hid snakes in her White House bedroom, smoked in an era when only men were supposed to, and shot her revolver at telegraph poles from the back of a train during a presidential trip in the West.

In later years, when she reigned as a Washington socialite, she had her butler ''concoct a very passable gin from oranges'' during Prohibition.

Of her White House days, she said simply: ''My father was president. I was without a particle of responsibility other than to enjoy myself, and I was alert for all that came my way.''

This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, June 3, 2001.